


Follow Me

by moonmoth (greyvvardenfell)



Series: Fictober 2019 [8]
Category: The Arcana (Visual Novel)
Genre: Gen, Mild Language, canon-typical blood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:21:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23569762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greyvvardenfell/pseuds/moonmoth
Summary: Russian field medic Julian does Austrian Count von Lutz a huge favor.
Relationships: Julian Devorak & Lucio
Series: Fictober 2019 [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1696495
Kudos: 2





	Follow Me

**Author's Note:**

> For the Fictober prompt: "Just follow me. I know the area."

The ever-present whistle and flare-fall-boom of distant shellbursts kept Lucio company in the swimming haze of pain and confusion. He remembered yelling. Yelling and running. Yelling and running and the loudest noise he’d ever heard, and then pain. Nothing new since. He couldn’t move from where he was, though every instinct he had, honed both on and off the battlefield, was begging him to do so.

His left arm felt… pinched. If he had to describe it, he would say pinched. Held between two massive red crab claws and gently, methodically pulled apart. The crab had hands made of knives and only one eye. It wasn’t wearing a hat. It should have had a hat.

——

When Lucio came to, one side of his chest was bound in gauze and thin paper strips. He stared down at it, momentarily perplexed, until he realized that the whole mess was only possible because he no longer had most of his left arm.

Darkness loomed outside the circle of firelight inside which he’d been lain, tucked up tight in a soldier’s bedroll. A half-empty canteen sat close enough to his right hand that he wouldn’t have needed to flail to find it, should he awaken thirsty. Lucio scowled into the night and, rather than ponder the absence of his arm, began to wonder when his men would come for him.

Within a few minutes, the crunch of twigs signalled someone’s approach. Surely, the confidence with which they walked meant it could only be a fellow Austrian, on patrol in captured territory. Lucio cleared his throat and shouted into the dark: “Hey! Hey!! I’m over here, numbskull! Took you long enough to find me!”

The noises stopped, and just for a moment, Lucio wondered if he’d made a mistake.

“You’re not afraid of making yourself known, are you?”

He would never admit to the girlish scream that emitted from his throat when a tall, lanky figure rose over the fire, stretching up, up, up into the night like it was made of the very smoke that masked it.

“I guess that’s an answer. I’m Julian. I wish I could say it was a pleasure to meet you, but there’s not much pleasure to be had in wartime, is there?”

Lucio scrambled backwards, kicking the canteen towards the intruder. It landed in the flames, smouldering uselessly before the man who had called himself Julian fished it out.

“Hey, don’t do that! This is the only water we have. At least, it’s the only water that’s close and clean. I used a lot when I… well, during your operation. By the way, you shouldn’t be moving for another couple of hours.”

At last, Lucio found his tongue. “Who says?” he spat, like he wasn’t sitting on a cushion of last season’s leaves in the darkness of an unfamiliar forest.

Julian chuckled. “The doctor who saved your life.”

“Pfft. Right. Like you’re a doctor.”

“I think I might be a little more qualified to make that judgement than you, considering the circumstances.”

“Circumstances?” Lucio shifted onto his knees and, pretending like the strange new balance of his torso had no affect on him, returned to the bedroll beside the fire. “I’ll have you know that I’m the Count von Lutz, and circumstances are what I make them.”

Silence met this declaration. Lucio swore he heard a stifled laugh before the man across the fire spoke again. “Right. Well, Count von Lutz, your uniform and accent, as well as your name, now, tell me that you’re Austrian.”

“Are you not Austrian?”

Julian did laugh this time. “Ha, did my speaking German fool you?”

“You’re in Austrian territory.”

“ _Au contraire, mon ami._ You’re in Russian territory, speaking to one of the Czar’s own.”

“What the fuck?!” Lucio reached for his cavalry saber, only to recall that he’d left it hanging from Camio’s saddlehorn before… before…

“Ah, ah, ah. Not so fast. You’ll overbalance if you try to swing around before you know the limits of your new, ah, situation.”

Lucio looked down, seeing the padded mess his left shoulder had become once more and slowly, slowly connected the dots in his head. “What the hell did you do to me?!”

“What did I do to you? Like I said earlier, I saved your life. Now, if you’re not going to attack me, or, more likely, further injure yourself by falling into the fire in a misguided attempt at attacking me, I’ll come around and explain things properly.”

Lucio scowled, then pouted, then stared balefully into the dark. If he really was in Russian territory, his men wouldn’t come to his rescue. Eventually, he realized that he had no choice but to listen to this doctor’s explanation and decide how to escape afterwards. He could do nothing until morning, anyhow, which, by the look of the sky, was hours away.

“Fine,” he grumbled. “Tell your stupid story.”

“Oh, it’s no story, my dear Count.” Julian strode around the fire, his long legs making quick work of the space. He folded himself gracefully onto the bedroll beside Lucio and held his hands out to the flames. “It’s the truth. You may not believe it, though, and I can’t say I blame you. Remarkable series of coincidences.”

But Lucio wasn’t listening. He was staring at Julian’s hair, and his eyepatch, dream-memories rising to the surface as the light from the fire danced over the bonesaw and scalpels resting inside the medical bag he wore slung over his shoulder.

“It… it was you. You were the crab!”

“I was the—? Excuse me?”

“The crab! I had a dream about a crab. It was red, and it had one eye, and its claws were knives, and it cut my fucking arm off. It was you!”

“I— yes. I suppose I was the, ah, the crab.”

“Hm.” Lucio wished he could cross his arms. Surely, though, if he remembered Julian through his haze, it meant that whatever else the man said had to be true. Lucio’s own memory could be trusted even degraded by fever, so perhaps he could rely on the word of a Russian to clear up some of the finer details. “So what happened?”

“Well.” Julian turned towards him, resting his elbows on his knees. “We were advancing. We knew you, or someone like you, was in the area, and our commander gave the usual, ‘Get in there and clear them out! Leave none alive!’ spiel. You have to understand, of course, we’re completely unprepared to be here. No food, no supplies. That’s why I used paper there, on your wound.” He curled his lip into a sneer. “It’s all we’ve got. We don’t even have helmets to wear against the shellfire.”

“That’s why the crab didn’t have a hat…” Lucio mused aloud. Julian peered at him for a moment, then shook his head and continued.

“Anyway, I volunteered to go ahead with the first charge, thinking that you’d make short work of us in the state we were in. I wasn’t wrong, but in all the confusion I got separated from the bulk of the fighting.”

He leaned forward and cleared a space in the dust beside the campfire, then waved Lucio closer to look as he drew a crude map of the battlefield. “This is where we came from, to the southeast. We caught up to your army here, between the ridge and the river. Fantastic position, by the way. Very defensible. But I went this way, instead of that, to get over here, and it’s a good thing I did, because what did I find but some poor Austrian soldier, left for dead, trapped by the body of his horse?”

 _The body of…?_ “Camio’s dead?”

Julian smiled sadly. “I am sorry about that. He looked like a mighty mount. Lipizzaner?”

“Yeah. Vienna trained,” said Lucio numbly. “Almost as handsome as me.”

With an awkward laugh, like he couldn’t tell whether or not Lucio was joking, Julian pushed on. “Unbeknownst to me, some of our men had set up a mine perimeter to keep your army from retreating down that passage. I'm… I’m not sure what happened, obviously, but from what I saw it looked like your Camio triggered one of them. It blew him, and you, back quite a bit and, well. He took most of the blast. In fact the worst of the damage happened when you landed. And then he landed. On your arm. Which is, ah, why you no longer, erm. What led to the, ah, the amputation.”

Lucio sat quietly. With any luck the rest of his army had escaped and were reforming without him right now, though if they’d found Camio’s body, they likely thought him dead or captured and would be overseeing the proper arrangements for a replacement. His mother would be delighted. He gritted his teeth at the thought of making that woman happy.

“Why did you help me?” he asked abruptly.

Julian startled. He’d grown used to the silence as it stretched out longer and longer. “Well, I… it’s not in my nature to leave a man to bleed, Count von Lutz. You understand that, don’t you?”

Lucio fixed a hard eye on him. “I understand that I’d rather kill him cleanly and walk away the winner.”

“Oh. Well, I suppose we can agree that either way, it’s better not to suffer?”

After a series of grunts and grumbles, Lucio nodded. “I suppose.”

“Alright, then. Now, I’d imagine you want to get back to your own front line.” Julian picked up a charred stick and prodded the fire, flaring it to life. “Come the morning, just follow me. I know the area.” He gestured to the map he’d drawn and grinned.

Lucio muttered something indistinct under his breath, blushing nervously as he watched Julian out of the corner of his eye.

“Sorry?”

“Thankyouforyourhelp.”

“Ah. Yes. Um, only doing my duty, Count von Lutz.”

“Lucio.”

“Hm?”

“My name. It’s Lucio. Count von Lutz is my title.”

“Well, then. It’s nice to meet you, Lucio.” Julian held out his hand.

Hesitantly, Lucio took it. “You too, Julian.”


End file.
